My Guitar

Hey, I'm ready to make a bunch of new posts on here. Sorry that I'm about to make a bunch of posts on the same day, but I don't think anyone really cares anyway. All of the stuff I'm about to submit was written for 2 classes I'm taking right now: an English writing class, where I just happen to write a lot about music, and a seminar centered on the history of Eastern European rock music during the Cold War, which is super interesting.

Anyway, here's a short description for English I wrote that gives all the details about my first guitar. 

My dad bought me my first guitar in 2015 when I was 13 years old. The manufacturer of the guitar is Cort, which you can see written in a fancy font at the top of the guitar’s neck. It is a relatively smaller guitar, being easier for me to handle than my dad’s guitar or his friend’s guitar, but the difference is subtle, and I still struggle to hold all of it with my small self and tiny hands sometimes.

At the top of the neck, you can see the tuning knobs twisted in all different directions from all the times I’ve had to re-tune the guitar, as well as experiment with wildly different tunings from songs by artists like Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell. The top of the neck is also the dustiest part of the guitar since it can’t really be touched underneath the mess of string ends. The untrimmed edges of the strings curve and loop like an elegant bronze jungle. They weren’t always like that, they were more neatly trimmed when we bought the guitar; my dad later helped me replace them with a new set of strings. I had broken the third string while trying to change my guitar to a Nick Drake tuning (“BEBEBE”), and he decided to help me replace the entire set of strings, since they were all starting to deteriorate; I remember they had started to turn green like an old penny. The first string, the thinnest one, had to be replaced twice because I broke it again recently while trying to play a Nick Drake song. I have to wonder how many times Nick Drake himself had to replace his own guitar strings with all his wacky tunings in his songs. 

As you look down the frets, you see that the neck of the guitar gets wider, the frets get closer together, and the strings are further from the neck. These shifts help give the different frets of the guitar their unique sounds. There are also some dots among the frets that help me remember which frets are the fifth, the seventh, and so on.

A layered ring of black and white circles surrounds the hole of the guitar, which matches the pattern on the edges of the body of the guitar. Within the hole is a white label card in the darkness that also says Cort, with a fancy border design. On the outside, the bottoms of the strings are connected to six pegs that seal them to the guitar. Two of the pegs have broken heads, a remnant of my dad changing the strings after not having changed them for five years.